MUSINGS OF A STORY MERCHANT

Dickerson Talks Dracula Sequel

It wasn't a stake through the heart that killed director Ernest (Demon Knight) Dickerson's follow-up to Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (entitled The Un-Dead), it was financing.

"We couldn't get funding," Dickerson explained to ShockTillYouDrop.com last night at L.A.'s Screamfest. "Maybe something will come up later but I don't know."

Dickerson, in early 2007, was attached to helm Un-Dead for Atchity Entertainment and Jan De Bont's Tulip Productions. Written by Ian Holt, and given the blessing of the Stoker Estate, the story picks up 25 years after the events of "Dracula." John Hurt, Monica Bellucci and Javier Bardem were, at the time, considered for the project. And they were not the only prestige names Dickerson had on his wish list.

"We were looking at Ralph Fiennes," he said. "We had interest from Isabella Rosellini, who wanted to play Countess Bathory. She read the script and wanted to make sure we were not going to do a parody. And we assured her, this was the real deal, a real sequel to Dracula. We were trying to find a good Basarab and my first choice was Javier Bardem, I thought he would've made a great one, but then we started hearing about this movie called No Country for Old Men and he got a little bit away from us."

How far along was Dickerson in pre-production? He told me he was "doing conceptual sketches, putting together the bible, working with the writer, scouting locations. We were getting photos of locations in Ireland because that's where we considered shooting it."

Now Atchity Entertainment and Tulip Productions have resurrected the film and are moving ahead, it appears, without Dickerson. A press release was sent out earlier this month announcing the Un-Dead novel and a 2009 production start on the film adaptation.

Next year is a busy one for the director anyway. He'll begin work on a remake of RKO's '40s gangster film Lady Scarface written by Tom Puryear. The redo, said Dickerson, will take place in modern day. "Where we started with is Griselda Blanco, the godmother who was talked about in Cocaine Cowboys. That's where we started in terms of creating the character and we just want to put something together an operatic and interesting, edgy love story."

AUTHOR-PRENEURS!

"In today’s unpredictable economic times, the only investment with any appreciable security at all is clearly investing in your own creative career—something you and only you can have control over. As I watch the Dow-Jones rise and fall and see that the projects of so many writing clients moving forward toward their pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, I commend all creative people with the vision to take risks on their own creativity. One thing for sure, the worst things are, the more the world needs stories!" -- Ken Atchity, the Story Merchant

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